Help Nooka Create Their First Wall Clock

Nooka is one of my favorite watch companies, despite the fact they only make digital watches. We took you inside their NYC lab here, and reviewed their Zirc here. Now, founder and chief creative officer Matthew Waldman has launched an initiative to build the brand's first ever wall clocks, and he's asking for your help.

Nooka is indeed a self-funded startup, and through the just launched crowd-funding site CKIE, he hopes to raise enough money to build clocks using the brand's instantly recognizable facades.

Those who do donate will have their names engraved on the back of the clocks, among several other incentives to participate. Certain levels of support are rewarded with gifts from the Nooka catalog, as well.

If you're reading this you probably agree with us that a phone is no substitute for a time piece. But that hasn't stopped our creative time keeping friends at Nooka from coming up with an app that actually has us clocking things on our iPhones.

Nooka have added a tactile dimension to coloring and organizing time, utilizing the displays seen on their watches. In the clock, timer, and stopwatch (which measures to 1/10 of a second) modes, you can swipe between three different display modes, and then use a pull-up color wheel to paint your interface. Our favorite feature though is the world time function, which uses a set of concentric rings for the hours display - think analog world time complication meets Tron.

Ok, so it's not a mechanical wonder, but it is cool. There's something really captivating about playing with time this way, and at 99 cents it's the cheapest "watch" you'll ever buy.

At HODINKEE we rarely talk about the digital side of life. And, let’s be honest here, that’s because digital watches (while being great for what they are) are often so very boring. We do make exceptions though, and one of the digital brands we feature a bit here is New York mob Nooka (the Zirc is a particular favourite). Nooka are into displaying time in non-traditional formats - hands and numbers being very old hat.

So we were a little bemused when we saw the images of the latest Nooka; gone is the square case and funky digi-dots. This Nooka actually looks like a normal watch! Sure it’s got that clean modern design thing going on, but it’s also got hands and regular hour markers. What’s with that?

On reading the fine print on the Nooka 360 it became clear that this watch is still pretty Nooka-y. Turns out that the entire case rotates, a whole 360 degrees (geddit?), meaning that awkward moving of your arm to correctly read the time is a thing of the past, now you can just watch you wrist. We also suspect that the kind of people who are always fiddling with the rotating bezels on their watches will love this one. This is a distinctly ‘Nooka’ twist, and one that we wholeheartedly approve of.

The Nooka 360 is available for pre-sale and will retail for $285. Click here for more details.